FollowSony’s Xperia Z Tablet is certainly an interesting device. Introduced at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona last month, the Xperia Z is a high-end slate with plenty of cool specs. However, with those specs and a price point that is sure to be high, the Xperia Z is right in the crosshairs of Apple’s iPad. Sony will hope the Xperia Z tablet can prove a viable alternative to Apple’s all-conquering device, much like the Xperia Z is the company’s first ever home run smartphone.
However, the tablet market is different. Whereas Apple’s iPhone is pretty dominant as a smartphone, there is enough choice and market space for the Xperia Z smartphone to look an attractive option, which of course it is. The difference in the tablet market is that Apple’s iPad it utterly dominant. Sure, there are some minor successes like Google’s Nexus 7, but even the respectable sales of the Nexus pale into insignificance next to the iPad’s.
If Sony wants to outright defeat the iPad then the Xperia Z Tablet will likely fail. The simple fact is the Xperia 10 could be a vastly better unit, but the iPad has a market presence that most can only dream of. Sony’s best bet of success is to approach tablets as it is smartphones, and to try and build its presence by offering a viable alternative to the iPad. In other words not to beat Apple in the market share, but to steal some of the iPad’s market.
However, before the Xperia Z can even take some of Apple’s glory it WILL need to be a kick-ass slate, and on paper things look good. The Sony tablet arrives with a 10.1 inch display featuring a resolution of 1200 x 1920 resulting in a pixel density of 224 ppi, while the iPad 4 has a 9.7 inch display with a higher resolution of 1536 x 2046 and more pixels per inch (264 ppi).
The Xperia Z has 2GB of RAM compared to the iPad 4’s lower 1GB, it also boasts a higher megapixel rate on the rear cam with 8.1-MP compared to the iPad’s 5-MP. A quad-core Snapdragon Krait processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, while Apple’s A6X dual-core CPU is running at 1.4 GHz.
